Lycos, the search engine once worth $5.4 billion, has resorted to finding advertisers by searching Google for related keywords.
The email below was sent after somebody searched for “buy a iphone” on Google and found a site of mine on page 5 of the results.
Lycos.co.uk are offering 1 company the chance to appear in the Number 1 Sponsored Link on the right handside of every page on a 12 month tenancy, with unlimited clicks. The keyword IPHONES costs £475. All keywords work on a broad match unless the additional keywords are sold separately. (broad match – every keyword that contains your choosen keyword)
* You can choose any keywords of your choice, if available.
If any keywords are of interest, you can contact me on 0845 020 4337 or via
email.Kind Regards
Linsay Weller
Adrac LtdIP: 82.71.96.158
Referer 1: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=buy+a+iphone&start=40&sa=N
Would Google ever do this?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
The keyword buy ins perform shit aswell.
They can barely give them away.
Desperate times. Desperate measures…
Unlimited clicks for a year for £475 means you’re gonna get almost no clicks.
I just checked their traffic:
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=lycos.co.uk&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
It’s amazing to realize that I own sites now with a lot more traffic than a site which was once one of the most popular on the entire Net.
I bought one of these Lycos links early this year and for the money I spent, has given me quite a decent return. Why not write a blog about how Google have suddenly whacked their cpc rates up during the credit crunch? Quality score mmmm sure!!!
This is not a promotion Lycos are running due the current financial situation in the UK. Lycos.co.uk have offered tenancy adverts for the last 6 years and are still doing well.
This was to make you aware of the Sponsored Links which are now available.
Please dont hesitate to contact me if you wish to discuss further.
All the best
And they need to compete with google adwords as well isnt it !
I wasn’t aware Lycos still existed. At least their RSS feed, unlike yours, doesn’t include giant animated banner ads.
Would Google ever whore themselves for money? Of course not
Lycos have been doing this a for a while though. I had calls going to clients for the past couple of years at least. It’s a self-perpetuating circle, the results are crap, so people don’t use them, they don’t make any money, they sell results, the results get crapper, less people use them……… To get to this stage you have to have given up any hope of becoming a ’serious’ search engine.
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Cabalamat this blog has been ad free for 18 months and the day I put an advert on there you complain. Do you expect people to never put ads on blogs?
More comments from Patrick AltoftI don’t object to ads; I welcome ads that are relevant or for products I’m interested in. I do object to animated banner ads — they’re distracting and make the text harder to read. If a web site has too much animated graphics on it, I simply don’t look at it.
I wasn’t aware it was the first day you put ads on — i hope you make lots of money from them.
lycos are now even pushing adult content to try and make money, if you see down the left hand side youll see the adult section…….. shame they have had to resort to selling there body to make money, there tagline is meet you there apparently ? i for one wont be being entertained by some of there new desperate measures to make money.
That message came from Adrac, not Lycos, Adrac sell the ads for Lycos. Also, I think this is a great idea, they are probably selling shit loads and its a great product to be pitching. Lycos will make money from this so no matter how many webmasters complain, there will still be 50x more buying the links and sending a bucket load of cash to Lycos.
Reply to posts from charles and Jason :
Charles : Do a search for Yahoo.co.uk on your traffic trend link, shows poor results also, people still use Yahoo!!
Jason : Yes, lycos allow adult content, so what? To make money? Of course, it’s the highest searched industry. Google recently lifted their ban on gambling sites on .co.uk allowing them to advertise via PPC, this is was obviously to make money also was it not??
And now they are clearly at the end of the road. I got this email today:
Dear User,
We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.
One of the activities that will be discontinued is our E-mail business division. For this reason, we are hereby terminating your account as of 15 February 2009. Currently, we are still working on finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider. If we should succeed to do so, we will inform you within the next 4 weeks. But as this is currently doubtful, we would like to ask you to assume the end of the service.
Prior to this date, you may continue to log in to your e-mail account and receive and send mail as usual. After this date, however, we will close your account and delete all content and access authorizations stored with Lycos in relation to your e-mail account, in accordance with legal requirements.
You will then no longer be able to receive or send e-mail under your e-mail address. The contents of your mailbox will also no longer be accessible. For this reason, we ask that you back up all important data from your Lycos e-mail account in the next few days and switch to another e-mail provider.
Should you still be entitled to services for any additional paid options, we will of course reimburse the balance to the bank account you provided.
We regret this measure and would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in us.
Kind regards,
Your LYCOS Mail Team
Lycos UK Ltd., 35 Vine Street, London, EC3N 2AA, UK
registered in ENGLAND AND WALES | Registration No. 03923511 | VAT number: 756796467
Copyright © 2009 Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lycos® is a registered trademark of Lycos, Inc.
E-Mail: mail-support-uk@lycos-europe.com | Tel.: 0906 784 4 784 (1£/min.)
http://www.lycos.co.uk
For anyone looking for a quick and easy way to backup their Lycos email accounts (or Jubii, Tripod, Caramail and Multimania) we’ve setup a site to do this, here:
Lycosmailbackup.com
Good luck to all those Lycos users on the move!
Ifdnrg team
http://www.ifdnrg.com
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